CriticalThinkingAcademy

 I am sick of bad arguments. So much so, that it's distracting me from other productive things I could be doing. It's not so much bad arguments per se, but the way they get repeated ad nauseum and proliferate throughout the masses of people who fail to see the weaknesses or simply don't want to acknowledge the weaknesses. Also, the way they are wielded while discussing contentious topics; as if they are beyond reasonable doubt and ultimately confirm the broader ideology from which it came. One thing that really bothers me among certain conservatives and Christian nationalists is when they claim that enlightenment values are somehow rooted in the Bible, despite enlightenment thinkers explicitly rejecting biblical principles. They will try to argue that “the Bible or Christianity provided the seeds for these principles to blossom” which to me is hilarious, because it's clear rhetoric that understates the actual total evidence . The claim that Enlightenment values (like in...

This post was inspired by conversations I've had recently with Trump supporters. The question of whether Trump is a Fascist frequently gets brought up, not just within these conversations, but within the broader American culture. Something very interesting happened in these conversations. One person said "Trump is not a fascist because he has not killed 12 million Jews". I found this implicit definition of Fascism quite striking, and puzzling. I responded by saying "killing Jews is not necessarily a feature of fascism. What the Nazis specifically did doesn't define Fascism more broadly considering figures like Franco and Salazar." They responded by saying "then what's an objective definition of Fascism?" They were really stressing this "objective" aspect of the term. I found this quite interesting because it revealed a significant misunderstanding of what definitions are, how we use them, and more broadly how concepts are used and evo...